Trieste’s Unit

Equity and Human Rights in Shakespeare Plays and in the Shakespearian Intertextualities of J.M. Coetzee’s Novels

 

 

The aim is to contribute to the general theme of the research project – an interdisciplinary exploration of the concept of equity in English Law and Literature from the sixteenth century to today – focusing on two authors, both recording and alimenting two different crucial moments, Shakespeare and Coetzee.
The project includes two parts:
a) Right of Property and Rights over the Human Body in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Othello and The Winter’s Tale
b) Equity and Shakespearian intertextualities in Coetzee’s novels.
On the one hand the two parts of the research work will run parallel, each delving into the specific aspects of the subject, on the other the common reference to Shakespeare’s discourse will ensure a constant complementarity of the two areas, on the basis of a shared methodology, conceptual approach and bibliography.

 

Right of Property and Rights over the Human Body in Shakespeare

 

Aspects of three of William Shakespeare’s plays – The Merchant of Venice, Othello and The Winter’s Tale – will be re-read with particular reference to the concept and practice of property connected with the human body. The author’s awareness of the legal problems staged will be related to the corresponding social expectancies of at least one important section of the audience.

 

Three phases of research are planned:
1) a brief comparison and contrast of recent studies on law and literature focusing on Shakespeare (with particular regard to the three plays chosen), on his relationships with the Inns of Court, or his experience of the contraposition between common law and equity in the law suits his family was involved in, especially in the case vs Edmund Lambert;
2) a re-evaluation of juridical aspects in Shakespeare’s work, related to the social background of what Lawrence Stone has called ‘the new gentry’, or rising bourgeoisie of the time (with its accompanying ideologies). This included the students of the Inns of Court or of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, who, in an age of extraordinary increase in education, in good part entered the professions. By integrating law and literature studies with these studies in social history and more recent interdisciplinary outlooks at the interplay between the development of judicial systems, state power and social structure, a wider perspective will be sought, to understand the dialogue between Shakespeare and his audience, recognize and ‘justify’ the author’s choices and explain why his audience could both stimulate and respond to the complex forms of this theatre and the juridical reforms it seems to advocate in many of its contexts, inspiring the quality of Shakespeare’s discourse.
3) an analysis of the concept of property as related to the background described and connected with the human body in the three plays mentioned.
In particular, in The Merchant of Venice, Shylock’s pound of flesh bond, his denunciation of slavery as a contemporary Christian practice, his dealings with his daughter Jessica, or with his servant Lancelot, all express a reflection on property and the human body, on new emerging concepts of social contracts, economics and justice, which appear more evident in their implications from an interdisciplinary point of view, and can restore full sense to the plays.
Similar problems are present in Othello and The Winter’s Tale, where the husbands dispose of their wives’ lives as they feel entitled to a right over their bodies, just as by marriage, according to the law, the woman currently lost any property she may have had, which became her husband’s (as emphasized in some of the dialogic exchanges between Portia and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice). Othello’s ‘judgement’, sentence and ‘execution’ of Desdemona, as well as Leontes’ similar ‘justice’ and condemnation of his wife Hermione (though secretly redressed by Paulina), can be reconsidered from a legal point of view as implicit but polemical denunciations. In both cases, concepts of property, possession and honour are at stake and questioned against the background of the ideological debate of the new gentry, socially and ethically different from the dynastic aristocracy and their system of values.

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Equity and Shakespearian intertextualities in Coetzee’s novels

 

The aim of this part of the research is to investigate how the concept of equity is at stake in Coetzee’s novels; he makes constant reference to a canon of Western literature (from Shakespeare to Dostoevskij and Kafka) and frequently re-reads and re-uses this canon. Among contemporary writers, Coetzee seems particularly interested in delving into the very core of the concept of equity. His motivation may be found in the particular South-African context in which he lived and wrote, but also in his more general attention to the problems and conditions of “otherness”. In Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), the main character, a magistrate in a borderland province of a not otherwise defined “empire”, follows a complex itinerary to come to terms with otherness on the basis of the principles of equity. In Life and Times of Michael K. (1974, 1983), the eponymous hero’s otherness introduces an estranged point of view on South-Africa. This comes in the form of allegory of an ethics dealing with the rhetorical devices through which the discourse of equity is built. Equity itself implies a discourse which is constantly produced and reproduced, manipulated and distorted, as other two of Coetzee’s novels show, by reference to very different situations and intertextual contexts: Foe, 1986 and The Master of Petersburg, 1994. At the same time the basic interests of his fiction are innovatively connected to an implicit reconsideration of the role of literature and of the literary author in our age. He accomplishes this thanks to a metaliterary reflection on the potential of literary discourse, and, particularly, on the role of intertextuality as linked to the definition of a specific kind of responsibility (see, for instance, Coetzee 1998).
Defoe and Dostoevskij are ever present in Coetzee’s literary discourse (for Defoe, see his Nobel speech, and for Dostoevskij Coetzee 1985, Watson 1994). Kafka is explicitly mentioned on many occasions (in the title of Life and Times of Michael K. and the chapter “At the Gate” in Elizabeth Costello 2003: see Barney 2004). The assumption this project is based upon is that Shakespeare is present in Coetzee’s works as a series of less explicit but basic references. These are important and fundamental for the issue of equity, linked as they are to the afore mentioned authors. Our aim is to identify and reconstruct the web of intertextual references enacted in Coetzee’s works, as the specific primary source of his discourse on equity. Through this reflection on the re-use of the canon (on the process of canon formation, see Coetzee 1991) in relation to the question of equity, the research further intends to reconsider Coetzee outside the postcolonial context, where his works are often situated. A new analysis would seem to be required. This will start from the specifics of the South-African context, and then go beyond the boundaries of the writer’s cultural origins, taking into account the pervading discussion on the responsibility of literature proposed in his works.

 

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Two phases of research are planned:
1. In the first phase the intertextual references present in Coetzee’s novels, with particular reference to Shakespeare, will be catalogued. For instance, as regards Disgrace, Gayatri Spivak (forthcoming) has recently noticed that the main reference on which the entire novel is grounded is King Lear. If, at the beginning of the tragedy, Cordelia is rejected by her father for refusing to show her love for him publicly and finds herself with “nothing”, in Disgrace Lucy, the protagonist Lurie’s daughter, eventually decides to put her life in her neighbour’s hands, thus remaining with “nothing”. The intertextual web linking Disgrace to King Lear can be detected in the space between these two voluntary self-negations by two daughters dependent on their fathers’ decisions, in other words between the daughters’ taking a stance and their fathers’ corresponding decisions that reveal a lack of equity. In many cases, there are detailed but almost hidden references, that can be identified only through a careful comparative reading and analysis. Another example is found in Elizabeth Costello, where the eponymous protagonist gives a lecture propounding a shocking argument based on a fundamental analogy between the Nazi extermination of the Jews and the current extermination of non-human animals by human beings. Thus, she calls for equity towards non-human animals, so infringing on current conceptions of justice. Elizabeth Costello, who introduces herself as the monkey in one of Kafka’s short stories, makes many hidden references to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in her lecture. In this novel representations of “otherness” are multiplied and points of view changed in order to give voice to different alterities (non human animals, Jews, women), creating a real polyphony.
2. in the second phase (in the second year) a detailed comparison with Shakespeare’s parallel texts will be carried out in order to highlight the way Coetzee’s discourses of equity are constructed through Shakespearean intertextualities, intertwined with reference to Kafka, Dostoevskij, Hoffmanstahl and other classics of the 19th and 20th century Western canon. The assumption we wish to verify is that equity might be seen by Coetzee as a way of giving voice to a plurality of forms of otherness and that literature can become the space where this possibility is thoroughly represented. In this sense, the perspective assumed will emphasize the different voices, their rights and capability to speak (a key question in the field of equity). This approach therefore differs from other critical perspectives which have preferred the use of focalization to define the specific interrelation between law and literature in Coetzee.

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